I make bread like this pretty much every weekend now. I generally put a little olive oil in for flavour and texture. I find the basic technique is amenable to all sorts of variations: hard flour, soft flour, adding wholemeal, rye and sourdough, and so on.

(Don't bake with a lot of rye unless you use sourdough or you add something to acidify the dough. Rye gluten does not do the right thing except in an acid environment. If you're in the Wellington area and you want a good sourdough culture, I've got one.)

I was asked to provide a recipe the other day and it occurred to me it was about time to write this up.

Really, you should do this with lamb shanks (ie the meaty forelegs) but lamb knuckles will do at a pinch.

When I was little my Mum would frequently buy lamb shanks and roast them, because they were cheap and tasty — so cheap that we could have one each. We would never have thought of cooking things in wine. These days the gourmets have discovered lamb shanks and they are a pretty expensive cut. I blame Alison Holst. The knuckles are still cheapish though, and maybe even better suited to the long slow treatment. You could probably do this with neck chops as well, although in that case I would suggest keeping them overnight in the fridge and skimming the fat off the top, lest you have a heart attack on a plate.

Step one (night before). Take your lamb. Get a sharp knife. Trim excess fat off. Slash the silver-skin membrane. Cut the cloves of garlic in half. Now grab a bowl or casserole or other crock and lay out the lamb with the rosemary and garlic. Pour in as much red wine as you feel you can wave goodbye to, or cover. If you don't cover, turn 2 or three times over the next day. By all means pick a container suitably shaped to maximise the lamb's exposure and minimise the wine. Add freshly ground pepper and salt — use your own judgement. Put in the fridge.

Step two (next day). Chop the onion small. Pat the lamb dry but save the wine marinade, the garlic, and the rosemary. Get a large pan/casserole and heat on the stove to medium. Brown the onion in the olive oil. Take it them out, and brown the lamb. Deglaze the pan with the saved wine, garlic and rosemary, and tomatoes. Put the meat back in. Top up with more wine if necessary so that the meat is almost covered. Put a lid on the pan, and cook very slowly for 2-3 hours, until the meat is very tender and the liquid is thick and glutinous.

Serve with rice or mashed potatoes, and yet more wine.

The advanced student can experiment with different meats and herbs; add carrot and celery; and try aromatics like orange peel, bay leaves or juniper berries. As long as the meat and the wine are cheap, tough, and red, it should come out fine.

This IS actually the poor person's version, if you were a pre-industrial Mediterranean peasant who made their own wine. But if you are really hard-up, skip the wine and the marinade; nick the rosemary from some rich bastard's garden (I grow it out the front, just for you); use salt and pepper and water for liquid instead; and extend out the cooking time a little. It'll be different, but still good. I do this with neck chops all the time.

Note to Joe Crim: no poor babies were minced in my shiny capitalist blender in testing this recipe. But under the dictatorship of the proletariat, red wine will be freely available as pathetic shallow people like me are enslaved in the vineyards.

I think most people have a small store of things they can cook with no conscious thought whatsoever. I know I do. It's small because after a hard day you cook what you know best, and after a few trips down the path of least resistance your culinary vocabulary shrinks to "Duh! Gah! Oog!".

So I'm pleased to have added one new thing recently. I've become a real fan of Italian cooking, which is a natural for the harried person of little leisure, since it relies on a few staples, few ingredients, and a few strong flavours. This recipe for cabbage, kale, or any other strong flavoured greens could not be more brainless.

The other night I made this recipe for the umpteenth time and realised that not only did I have no idea where I got it, but that in all probability I invented it. So allow me to present:

The Good Old Red White and Green

(Which happen also to be the colours of the flags of Bulgaria, Equatorial Guinea, Hungary, Kuwait, Niger, Oman, Madagascar, Suriname, India, Tajikistan, Iran and Kurdistan. Let us now praise flag-crazed nerds. But I digress.)

You require:

Half a red pepper

One small onion

A quarter of a cabbage

A large splash of olive oil

Enough salt

Thinly slice all ingredients, but keep them separated for now. They will get to know each other better soon enough.

Find a saucepan or pot with a decent lid, and heat the oil to a low-medium heat. Cook the onion gently for a couple of minutes, until transparent. Then add the sliced pepper, and cook for another couple of minutes. Last, add the cabbage, and stir thoroughly.

Add a little water, perhaps a couple of tablespoons. (Less if you washed the cabbage, more if it's not so fresh or if you like a little saucy liquid). Put the lid on and wander off for ten minutes. The idea is that the cabbage steams rather than stir fries, so keep the heat low.

Provides a tasty serving for two to four people, depending on appetite and the other dishes.

Especially for Sue, we present the failsafe mushroom recipe. Loosely based on an Italian original, via Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, and Elizabeth David.

Mushrooms. Lots. I like the ugly brown ones.

Generous sprigs of parsley, flat-leafed Italian for choice.

Two or three cloves of garlic, chopped

Enough olive oil to coat the bottom of a heavy frying pan.

Slice your mushrooms. If I have little buttons, I tend to cut them in quarters.

Heat the pan to a medium heat — a little below smoking, but enough for the mushrooms to brown.

Fry the chopped garlic until the garlic cooking smell rises. Biff in the mushrooms and stir every now and then so that they brown evenly. You'll know the pan is hot enough because the mushrooms will squeak. If they go soggy and leak before you're done, then the pan was not hot enough. You may need to add oil as the mushrooms soak it up.

Finally, stir through chopped parsley and some salt. The salt will make the mushrooms weep and a little steaming will take place.

Serve.

Variations include moistening with a little white wine, adding some other wild fungi, adding butter to the oil, and experimenting with the herbs.

Your genuine latke is a cake of grated potato and a little onion, bound with an egg and fried in oil. (I was horrified to read a recipe the other day for alleged "vegan latkes" which were mainly composed of kumara. In the spirit of "fruit drink", "dairy food", "frozen confection", this clearly should have been called "fried grated gentile vegetable cake". But I digress.) Latkes are a traditional food at Hanukah, because food fried in oil is meant to remind you of the miracle of the lamps. (Read the link, already).

Christchurch rejoices in Czech takeaway carts (can you believe it?) which sell a potato pancake called bramborak, not unlike the latke, but they seem large and sloppy and stodgy by comparison. Bound to be some relation though.

Anyway …

Peel 6 medium potatoes. In my mind, that's fist-sized. Grate them. I use a food processor. (I discovered the grating attachment at the back of the cupboard last weekend, but that's another much more boring story).

Take your grated potato in handfuls and squeeze out the liquid into a bowl. This is a fun job for small children, or indeed anyone with a sense of humour. Now tip the liquid out. You may think it's easier to squeeze right into the sink, which it is, right up until you drop the potato in there by mistake.

Now the hard part. Grate a small onion. Supposedly, you will cry less if you breathe through your mouth.

In a bowl, mix up the potato, the onion, a teaspoon of salt, an egg, and a tablespoon of oil. Cheats and habitual worriers may add a little flour or matzah meal.

Take a heavy pan, fill it at least one finger deep with oil, and heat to frying temperature. (The classic test is to drop a cube of bread in. It should take about 30 seconds to go golden brown.)

Mould little cakes about a finger thick and four fingers in diameter. I find a large spoon helps here, and then you can gently nudge the latke off the spoon into the oil.

Fry each side once until golden brown.

Wait a little between latkes as you add them. If you fill the whole pan at once, the oil temperature will drop.

In theory, you can do this in batches, put the cooked ones on a paper towel-covered plate in the warming drawer, and then dish them all up. In practise, they usually get eaten as they come out. Cooks beware: if you don't make sure to snarf a few yourself, the others will get them all by the time you're finished.

If you made gribnes, you can add some chicken fat to the oil, which improves the flavour.

Some variations involve putting sugar on them, but in my mind they're better salted. There is also a dessert latke made from grated apple (and without the onion, of course).

If the frying seems like a lot of bother, grease a tin, press all the mixture in, and bake in a moderate oven until brown on top. You now have a potato kugel. Delicious.

Aioli is garlic mayonnaise. Ajada is the Judeo-Spanish version thereof, at least according to Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food.

I can't spot anything distinctively Jewish about Ajada, but I can attest that the recipe I am about to share with you is pungent and delicious and well worth making.

Mix a half and half cup of olive oil and sunflower oil.

Tip an egg yolk into a warm ceramic bowl and stir in some crushed garlic with a whisk. Five fat cloves is enough for me. Then blend in a tablespoon of water too, until it's all creamy-looking. A pinch of salt would do no harm at this point.

With a steady hand, drizzle in the oil drop by drop, and whisk. I don't think asking your lovely assistant to do the drizzling would be cheating. Make sure the oil is always thoroughly stirred in.

As you add more oil, you can increase the rate of drizzle to a thin stream. Somehow the more you add, the more easily it can be absorbed. The mixture should be noticeably thickened by the time you're halfway through the cup.

When all the oil is in, the ajada should be thick and gloopy. Stir in the juice of half a lemon.

I asked Hannah what she wanted for dinner tonight, and she replied: fish. Smoked fish. It turned out that kedgeree was what she really wanted.

I like kedgeree very much. I like smoked fish in general, I'm found of rice dishes, and my mum used to make kedgeree, so it's a done deal, really.

Kedgeree is actually what food fashion victims would call "fusion" cuisine. It is neither English nor Indian, having been invented by conquered chefs in an attempt to make something edible for the sahib from a kipper. The word itself comes from the Hindi "khichree", which is a tasty conglomerate of rice and split peas. Why anyone thought smoked fish was a reasonable substitute for the split pea is a mystery to me, but there you are. (Actually, khichri is literally "a mixture", without specifying substances involved, but in a food context I understand it's always rice + legumes).

I've noticed that many smoked fish recipes involve poaching the fish in milk, and then tell you to discard the milk. I could see the sense of this if the fish had been given a good strong cold smoke for genuine preservation, but in these effete days where smoke is just a flavouring agent, I can tell you two things. First, the milk is probably unnecessary. Second, if you do decide to use it on textural grounds, the resulting liquor is delicious. Hannah and I drank smoked fish milk from mugs, and it was a nice way to take the edge off before dinner.

Stephen's Inappropriately Augmented Kedgeree

Serves two hungry people by itself or more people who are just on the peckish side.

300-400g of smoked fish. I prefer something with texture, oil, and big flakes, so in New Zealand something like kahawai, trevally or warehou would all be good. Heather, if this sparks another craving, I suggest mackerel. Yer actual kipper tends to be too fine and unflakable for me.

Cook the rice. Absorption method: boil 1 ½ cups of water; tip in the rice and a teaspoon of salt; turn right down; turn the heat off after 15 minutes. Very dry rice may require 2 cups of water. It's not an exact science, but by turning the heat off and leaving to stand, fluffy goodness is guaranteed.

Simmer the fish in enough milk to not quite cover it, turning it over after five minutes for another minute or two. Then drain the fish, skin it and flake it. As noted above, gluttons should drink the milk and not let it go to waste. I suspect it would be used to advantage in a potato casserole.

Put the butter in a large pan on a low heat and soften any vegetables you decided to toss in. Members of the onion family and the Umbelliferae work best with fish, I think, but red pepper provides crunch, sweetness, and pretty colours. Mix in the fish and the curry powder. (Yes, inauthentic, no such thing as curry powder in India, thank you, now biff it in. There's no such thing as hamburgers in Hamburg either. Well, there are now, but there weren't before. Just do as I say, all right?)

Stir in the rice, breaking up any naughty lumps. The more butter you put in, the easier (and tastier) this will be, but it's between you and your cardiologist. Your heart specialist will have to let you get away with chopping up eggs to put on top, because dietary cholesterol makes bugger all diffence, and the whole egg has lecithin and other healthy goodies in it. You could mix the egg through, but then it will mush up, and the raison d'etre of Rice With Things In in my opinion is that said things are Distinguishable Lumps.